Set in 1817 during the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Colonel Chabert is about a legendary soldier presumed dead who returns home to discover that life has proceeded without him, then struggles to reclaim his identity, causing intense emotional disruptions all around him. The title character is played by the…
It’s pointless to respectfully review a film as ineptly written, indifferently directed, and slothfully performed as Just Cause, the new legal thriller about a Harvard law professor and anti-death penalty advocate (Sean Connery) who heads down south to the Florida Everglades to win freedom for condemned black murderer Bobby Earl…
Subdued, elegant, and directed with disarming simplicity, I, the Worst of All (Yo, La Peor de Todas) is the kind of historical drama whose resonance sneaks up on you. On the surface, it’s an intimate religious drama about a minor figure in Catholic history, a 17th-century Mexican writer and nun…
A distinctive voice in Texas criticism was lost February 16 when Dallas Morning News film writer Russell Smith died in his Dallas home of AIDS complications. He was 38. Born and raised in Dallas, he joined the Dallas Morning News 12 years ago, working as a copy editor and a…
Okay, I’m gonna describe this woman. She’s got fluffy blonde hair–teased, permed, and coiffed–about $300 worth. She’s got a straight nose, thin lips and large bedroomy eyes. She wears tiny pearl earrings and a simple pearl necklace that hangs down onto a tanned neck and chest. Her dress is classic–either…
Few literature students have escaped exposure to the works of T.S. Eliot. Although Eliot’s influence has waned somewhat, he represented, for the post-World War II American academic elite, a living wish-fulfillment fantasy of everything they thought a man of letters should be–Anglophilic to the extreme (he renounced his American citizenship…
The story of Leni Riefenstahl’s rise from renowned professional dancer to beloved German movie star to perhaps the greatest woman filmmaker of all time is marked by one constant–her brash, archaic, even narcissistic belief in herself and her creative abilities. Her artistic achievements, specifically her film versions of the gargantuan…
About 10 minutes into Sam Raimi’s Western The Quick and the Dead, his nomadic, gunslinging heroine, Ellen (Sharon Stone), slouches down in a rickety chair on the front porch of a saloon in the middle of Redemption, a Southwestern town so desolate even the cacti look withered, and lets a…
Informed that his interviewer saw The Quick and the Dead the night before, Sam Raimi gets excited. “How full was the theater?” he asks. “Did they clap during the exciting parts? Did they go for popcorn during the quiet parts? Did everybody generally seem to like it?” He’s told that…
First-time feature filmmaker David Frankel’s Miami Rhapsody is so fleet-footed, cheerful, and entertaining it’s tempting to dismiss it as just another piece of popcorn entertainment. But there’s clearly a certain craft–even art–to creating a motion picture that makes you feel this swoony, giddy, and grateful, and in that light, Frankel’s…
Generally speaking, directors who try to make movies in which characters represent political or philosophical beliefs have a difficult time making those people feel authentic to movie audiences. One of two things usually happens: either the filmmaker reduces the characters to strident mouthpieces (David Mamet’s adaptation of his own play…
It’s rare that an independent film manages to survive and thrive outside the realm of major Hollywood distribution companies. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Sankofa, a bold low-budget slave epic currently making its way across North America, city by city, drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds wherever it plays…
From the fertile mind of University of North Texas film teacher Justin Wyatt (who’s also the author of High Concept, a compelling analysis of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality) comes one of the boldest and most provocative film festivals this city has seen in a while. Titled The Cinematic Body: A Film…
I’m really sick of talkin’ about sperm. I don’t wanna hear about it. I don’t wanna hear about people freezin’ sperm, savin’ sperm, bankin’ sperm, borrowin’ sperm, gettin’ sperm from their brother, donatin’ sperm, fightin’ custody battles over sperm, buyin’ sperm, sellin’ sperm, or otherwise doing anything with sperm except…
To Live, the latest historical melodrama from Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, isn’t anything like the film I’d been led to anticipate–and that’s good. The trailers playing in art houses across the United States position it as a traditionally sentimental epic about a poor family buffeted by the winds of history;…
There’s nobody in American movies like Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat. Best known stateside as the stoic center of John Woo’s most dizzying action maelstroms (including The Killer and Hard-Boiled), Chow’s antiheroic presence is so alluring that he seems born to play such parts. (It’s been argued that Chow’s good…
Raucous, bawdy, sexy, and violent, Queen Margot is history as feverishly overwrought soap opera–history painted in tears, sweat, blood, and semen, with a very broad brush. In telling the tale of the title character, who survived a ghastly royal power struggle that pitted Catholic against Protestant and royal against royal…
I think I’m the last person in America who doesn’t give one flyin’ flip about what he eats. “Why are you drownin’ those pancakes in syrup?” Is this a question? This is not a question. Do I have to answer this? “I can’t believe you’re puttin’ butter on that.” Why…
AUSTIN–Early into Before Sunrise, as Jesse (the traveling American played by Ethan Hawke) and Celine (the French student, portrayed by Julie Delpy) share their first moments on Eurail bound for Vienna, Hawke’s character explains an idea for a cable access program that would run 24 hours a day for an…
All movie fans have a filmmaker they latch onto, take to heart, and enthusiastically root for. Their triumphs make you euphoric and their failures make you surly and sad, and once you’re plugged into the thrill of following their careers, the emergence of each new work is simultaneously thrilling and…
Paul Newman is our most complex living movie icon. The man and his image are loaded with contradictions–he is an actor of fairly limited abilities, but at least a dozen of his performances from a 41-year career have been burned into our consciousness with the force of genius. Newman’s appearances…
For several years now, I’ve wondered if I simply didn’t get the movies of Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish filmmaker who specializes in fare so abstract, obtuse, and overtly symbolic that it’s nearly impossible to read it fully and accurately in one sitting. The first film of his that I sat…
